


A Winter's Tale

by Northland



Category: Mythago Wood - Robert Holdstock
Genre: Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/pseuds/Northland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How can I remember these things, if they never happened?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Winter's Tale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Syksy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syksy/gifts).



> Thank you so much for the chance to play in one of my favourite fantasy creations, Syksy! I hope you enjoy this story.

_Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,  
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands..._

_Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;_  
 _I whisper with my lips close to your ear,_  
 _I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you_.  
Walt Whitman

* * *

I don't remember the moment of my birth. The outlander witch Isa told me that was impossible for those born of woman's blood; but why shouldn’t we who are born of the wood recall it?

Sometimes I try to cast my thought back to the instant that I was formed out of the wood, molded from -- what? dead leaves, moss, the last muddy snow of spring? -- and rose into the world for the first time. How can I not remember that?

When I look down at my arm, I see the inked deer clan mark. I remember the night it was scratched into my flesh: the stink of the poorly cured hides the dreamer wore, the dark flash of the black ice knife she cut me with, the blood I tasted when I bit my lip to keep silence. I know how to throw the spear and draw the bow. I remember my mother, and why I must avenge her. All these things leap forward into my memory eagerly, like a well-trained hound.

"I don't understand," I said once to Isa. "How can I remember these things, if they never happened?"

I don't know, she said. But each mythago is formed with the knowledge of its own story.

"Did you make me? Or did someone else from the outside?"

Again she said, I don't know.

*

I stole Isa’s book of magic, hoping to learn more than she would tell me about how a mythago was created. Ogham I had learned, runes too, and the pecked dots and lines of the cave people, but I could not read the strangely looping marks that covered the leaves of Isa's book. Even so, before returning the book I tore out a piece to keep. After years of wearing it next to my skin, some of the marks are blurred, but I have it still.

_Ryhope Wood has been highly mythoactive for at least thirty years, maybe longer, but we don't know why. Nor did Alex ever tackle that question, for all his hero-worship of George Huxley. Huxley may have set things in motion with his experiments and crude electrotherapy; that doesn't explain how or why the wood has continued to generate so many powerful mythagos and myth landscapes. Is it because people with strong susceptibility to them are somehow drawn to this place, perpetuating the phenomenon? Is it only the high point of a natural cycle which will eventually decline again? Or is it a defense mechanism for the wood?_

_At one point I believed that was the strongest hypothesis, but in the modern world it seems as though drawing attention to Ryhope could only endanger it. A small, useless piece of bramble and woodland might escape notice and remain undisturbed, especially as most of it is on private land. A mysterious forest in which people vanish seems calculated to bring the kind of interest from the authorities that would eventually destroy it._

_Perhaps that’s the origin of the hollowings; they may be another way for the wood to build layers upon layers for protection of the central core (wherever or whatever it is), or to connect with other mythogenesis zones across the world._

_It gnaws at me that I don't know, and will never learn. Even if I managed to fight my way through the vortices and escape the wood again, who knows how much time has passed? Out there in Shadoxhurst village and the rest of England, perhaps only a year or two has gone by - here in the Isle of Women I've lived half my life. I have grown old, become their wise woman, the shaman who tells stories of the mythical outlands._

_Most days I believe I'm resigned to that. I can even find contentment in this place from time to time..._

*

If I am a child of the wood and winter, then my mother never existed and I had no reason to revenge her death upon my father. Isa kept those words from her tongue, but I can see a footprint in snow. When I first followed that trail to its end, I wanted to kill her for destroying the meaning of my oath. But because I had saved her life once, I could not take it from her then.

When I was still a young girl, I slew raiders who had stolen Isa and were taking her to Mabathagus. What he wanted with Isa I do not know; she never said. From time to time through the years a band of his hawks would pass by, still searching for her, but they never found her. For we had concealed her on the Isle of Women, which is also called the Isle of Warriors: the home of Eskarn and her sisters, the finest fighters in all lands, hidden from everyone but those who are driven to find and learn from them.

Isa refused to speak of it, but I am sure that they were, like me, daughters of the wood; each of them had their story. I wonder if there is another Isle elsewhere in the forest, with another Lennis training there. Is she my sister, or my twin? What would happen if we met?

Now that my father is dead I never think of him. But sometimes when I remember my mother, she wears Isa's face.

*

On the morning I left the Isle wind scoured the frozen marsh, rattling the dead reeds close to shore and pushing scallops of snow across the open spans of ice. It was so cold that the sun's sisters had joined her - rainbow arcs embraced the sun, with a smaller star shining to each side of it.

I stood at the head of the hidden path over the treacherous ice. Eskarn and her sisters, who had taught me all the skills that I would need on this journey, gathered to say farewell. Molpadia, Kesair, Anluan: each spoke a word or two and clapped my back or put a small gift into my hands.

Isa’s hands were empty. But she laid her hands on my shoulders, bent to give me a mother's kiss, and whispered in my ear, "You will triumph. Your story tells me so. Even in my land and my time your name was still known."

I knew she was lying, but the lie tasted sweet in my mouth. And she spoke truth also, at least about the success of my pursuit. I had to hunt my father through many hollowings, even to the borders of Lavondyss, before I caught him. And though it cost my hand, in the end I killed him and brought his spear back to the grave of my mother, as I had sworn.

But that is not a story to be told in winter.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Firerose and snowballjane for speedy & insightful beta-reading.


End file.
